Twitter got a boost on Wednesday — and it came from Wall Street and not the White House.
One prominent analyst, citing continued engagement by President Trump, raised his outlook on the shares of the struggling micro-blogging service to buy from neutral.
The analyst, Richard Greenfield, of BTIG, also put a 12-month target price of $25 on the stock.
Twitter shares responded by jumping 2.6 percent, to $18.72 in heavy trading.
The shares are up 13 percent since Trump took office on Jan. 20.
“One of the greatest challenges Twitter has faced is consumers passively using the platform like an RSS news reader,” Greenfield wrote in a note accompanying his upgrade.
“President Trump is giving people a reason to be actively engaged on an ongoing basis.”
Greenfield noted that Trump’s use of Twitter has a precedent in President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s taking to the radio — when that media was new — to broadcast “fireside chats” to 60 million Americans.
Then, quoting the White House Historical Association, Greenfield wrote, “Presidents before him always had to rely on newspaper reporters and editors to convey their words to the public, leaving their original message open to editorial slant or misquoting. Live radio, by contrast, left no room for misquotation.”
The analyst acknowledged Twitter’s second chance, courtesy of Trump, is no slam-dunk for the stock.
Whatever engagement Trump has brought to the brand, he said, “cannot overcome the revenue downdraft from Twitter’s user-growth challenges experienced in 2015 and into 2016.”
Twitter user was up by just 3 percent as of Sept. 30 compared to a year earlier.
Investors will get a sense of those challenges on Thursday, when Twitter reports fourth-quarter results.
The San Francisco company had a history of underperforming before being “thrust into the global zeitgeist,” as Greenfield put it.
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